Elizabeth ShawThe Middle Glacier, near the 20 Mile Valley in the Chugach Mountains along the Turnagain Arm.

I started my first morning in Alaska with a six-mile run up to the base of Mt. Alyeska and back, along a bike path following the Alyeska Highway. I run past dirt side roads with names like Glacier Creek and Flyfishing Lane -- the kind of names that urban developers back home like to give their condos to create a little false ambience. But here, I'm actually running on a footbridge across Glacier Creek, where anglers are casting for salmon along the rocky turns below.

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Reporter Elizabeth Shaw is in Alaska as part of a fellowship program. The topic is: "Alaska: Reporting on the Climate Frontier."

Friendly dogs are everywhere, mostly malamutes and huskies and mixes that look well armored for cold weather.

Alaska has the greatest concentration of glaciers in the entire U.S., covering 29,000 square miles, or five percent of the state. Here in the Chugach Mountains, I can see no less than seven glaciers. Not a bad view.
Later, we head out for my first close-up view of Alaska's glaciers.

We drive out along the shoreline of Turnagain Arm where Frans points out the grayed skeletons of broken houses on the edges of the tidal flats -- the still-visible remains of the Good Friday Earthquake of March 27, 1964 -- the strongest earthquake ever recorded in North America, registering 9.2 on the Richter scale. It was centered in the northern end of Prince William Sound, about 50 miles from Portage Valley. It lasted more than three minutes and released twice the energy of the famous 1906 San Francisco earthquake.

In the town of Portage, mud spurted up to 100 feet high and the land sank eight feet, allowing the high tides of Turnagain Arm to flood over the city, destroying buildings and trees in its wake. Avalanches in Portage Valley blocked roads and opened huge chasms

At Portage we visit the Begich Boggs Visitor Center -- named for two members of Congress, Alaskan Rep. Nick Begich and Speaker of the House Hale Boggs of Louisiana, whose plane vanished in this region in 1972 during a stormy flight from Anchorage to Juneau in 1972. Their plane was never found.

When we arrive at Portage Lake, it's gray and raining and cold. The Portage Glacier, the centerpiece of the interpretive program when the visitor center was built, can no longer been seen. You have to take a boat, Jen says, to go around the bend of the mountains to see it.

The Burns Glacier, which still emptied into Portage Lake when Frans first came here 10 years ago, now hangs hundreds of feet above the shore.
"You could come out here and see huge chunks of ice constantly calving off into the water," he said. "You can see how far that's changed just since then." At our feet, a small, chair-sized chunk bobs on the milky water like an ice sculpture escaped from a buffet table.

elizabeth ShawA small chunk of ice floats free in Portage Lake. The glaciers have receded from the lakeshore since 1999, with the main glacier no longer visible from the visitor center built to view it.

These glaciers are part of a natural cycle, no doubt, advancing and receding as the world's climate cools and warms over the course of thousands of years. The last "Little Ice Age" began about 800 years ago and ended in the late 1800s. Portage Lake was created by the retreat of Portage Glacier, where the visitor center was recently built on the rock piles marking its front edge in 1852. The process sped up into high gear after 1914, leaving the lake in its wake.

But that natural process has gone into an unnaturally high gear. According to the findings of the Union of Concerned Scientists, the scientific consensus is that global warming is now occurring at an unprecedented rate, and that most of the warming over the past 50 years has been caused by human activity.

U.S. Geological Survey scientists estimate that by 2030, all the glaciers will be gone from Montana's Glacier National Park. That's not just a loss of scenery. The warming climate is forcing some species higher and higher in search of the cool they require, until they can go no higher and vanish. The loss of snowpack and seasonal melt is having dire consequences on fresh water supplies.

Higher temperatures in the spring and summer and earlier snowmelt has also led to more wildfires. The U.S. Forest Service recorded the 2006 fire season with a 45-year record high in number of acres burned.

That night, Jen took me with her to Building Bridges of Anchorage, an organization formed to celebrate Alaska's cultural diversity and enhance understanding. We sat at a table with a woman and her mother who are of the Supiak people, the Chugach Eskimo who have inhabitated the Prince William Sound for 3,000 to 4,000 years.

We talk about all the development Alaska has seen in our lifetimes, from mountainsides blasted out to make way for parking lots, to the growing number of bear encounters as the animals are pushed out of their foraging grounds and into people's backyards.

Around the room, I hear the stories of a man and his wife who came here as political refugees from an island in the South Pacific...a Hmong man from southeast Asia performs on some ancient tribal instrument that looks like a bow fashioned of reeds and sounds like a bagpipe...women in gold-and-white Russian Orthodox gowns float across the floor like clockwork dancers.

I am struck by how young Alaska seems. Even in 2008 in Anchorage, where Subway and McDonald's signs dot the strip malls, it still has that frontier feel, where people come from everywhere to find a home, a future, a dream.

It's like travelling back in time in a geological sense too. In Michigan, our Great Lakes were formed by glaciers 10,000 years ago. For most of us, that knowledge is nothing more than some abstract fact in a natural history book. Here in Alaska, those forces are real and now. Understanding these huge geological forces is second-nature to Alaskans, because they live inside it, every day.